No business is a failure until you give up

Particle physics tells us there are sub-atomic objects so small they cannot be observed until after they have collided with each other, after which they cease to exist. The same principle applies to the line between business success and failure. As long as your business is still in business, the difference between success and failure is undetectable. While you breathe, you can fix things. Only after the company has expired does failure come to seem inevitable — a thick black line of hopelessness that appears only in hindsight.

As noted academic Bluto Blutarsky said in the movie Animal House, “Nothing is over until we decide it is.” Business literature is full of people who could have given up — and been branded by history as losers (if history remembered them at all). Instead, they learned from their mistakes, revised their dreams and achieved lasting glory. Consider the following:

Henry Ford suffered through several automotive industry failures, producing overpriced, low-quality cars before developing the Model T in 1908. If Ford had a better idea, it’s because he started with so many bad ones.

Walt Disney wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. No one would hire him. So he started a commercial art studio that he supported by taking a part-time job. Then he started an animation company whose products were huge hits in Kansas City. The company went bankrupt. So Disney started over in Los Angeles, and failed again, this time losing his most popular character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to a competitor. Disney gave it one more shot, creating a squeaky-voiced mouse called Mortimer. (Fortunately, his wife Lillian renamed the character Mickey.)

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up

Steve Jobs After being fired from Apple in 1985, Jobs spent years — and hundreds of millions — developing the NeXT computer system. The powerful, innovation workstation was beloved by techies — Tim Berners-Lee designed the first Web browser on a NeXT — but a commercial failure. NeXT was later bought by Apple, setting the stage for Jobs’ historic comeback. In his book Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson opined that what made Jobs so successful the second time around was his “brilliant failure” at NeXT.

Thomas Edison became famous for his many game-changing inventions, from the light bulb to the phonograph to the movie camera. But no one better understood the link between success and failure. When chided for the poor results from his work developing a nickel-iron battery, he famously responded, “Results? Why, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.” It was his battery research that inspired Edison to prospect for nickel in Sudbury, Ont. He is credited with being the first to find the Falconbridge ore body. But his attempt to sink a shaft failed when he kept encountering quicksand. After two seasons of trying, the man who once pronounced, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up,” slunk back to his laboratory.